Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, February 11, 1997

The Los Angeles school board rejected not one ebonics resolution but two yesterday, voting instead to look more closely at existing programs designed to help thousands of black students master standard English.

Yet, ebonics is far from a dead issue in the nation's second largest school district. The board dropped one proposal and voted 5-to-2 against another, both by Barbara Boudreaux, the only black commissioner on the Los Angeles school board.

President Trump addresses nation after mass shooting at Florida SchoolWhite House

The new proposal, approved 4 to 3, calls for a full evaluation by May 1 of existing programs for students who speak ebonics, or black English. From there, the proposal calls for new recommendations for helping students who speak ebonics -- although it does not use the e-word.

It also asks for the most recent data on black student achievement to be brought before the board, perhaps casting doubt on the widely held assertion repeated in Boudreaux's resolutions that the "Los Angeles Unified School District (is) failing to meet the needs of African American students in the areas of English usage and literacy skills." Boudreaux's second resolution says that "school districts throughout the nation" are also failing black students.

Both plans -- one mentioning "ebonics" and the other avoiding the much-mocked expression -- would have automatically expanded the language program without evaluating it.

Los Angeles attracted national attention last month when Boudreaux followed Oakland's example by proposing to expand language training for students who speak black English.

But she did not receive the approval -- locally, anyway -- that her Oakland counterpart, Toni Cook, won after introducing a similar plan December 18. Oakland is the state's only school district with a majority of African American students. And while the nation ranted against ebonics and the board's badly written ebonics proposal, the Oakland school board, and many parents, embraced it.

Not so in Los Angeles, where the majority of pupils are Latino, and where the politics of bilingual education dollars reigns supreme.

"We believe the program is an ideological program," Alan Clayton of the Chicano Employees Association told the Los Angeles school board last night in urging them to reject Boudreaux's plans. "We should take ideology out of the school system and make sure that the students learn, get jobs and move out of the community."

The mood at the school board was more reserved than it had been last month, when the ebonics proposal was introduced, although a shouting match broke out between two men on either side of the issue who had to be gaveled to order.

EBONICS TRAINING MEASURES REJECTED

Barbara Boudreaux, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School District board, introduced two measures last month to train all teachers to understand ebonics and provide better teaching methods to help students learn mainstream English. Her proposals, rejected last night, called for:

-- The district to acknowledge ebonics as a distinct language.

-- Teachers to spend up to 18 hours learning ebonics.

-- Teachers to treat ebonics- speaking children as if they spoke a distinctly different language, like Spanish.

A substitute proposal was approved last night. It requires the district to review by May 1 existing programs for students who speak ebonics, or black English.